You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

We're All Happy I'm Not Australian

Lucky that I'm not Australian, that is. Because if I were, this website would be the All-John-Howard, All-The-Time edition of You Are Dumb Dot Net.

Seriously. I don't know why you people keep electing him, or pulling his name out of a koala bear's ass, or however the hell you choose your leaders down there, but maybe you should cut it out? I know, as an American, I'm not speaking from the moral high ground here, but at least we can pretend to have excuses like "voter fraud". Last time I checked, Diebold didn't start manufacturing eucalyptus suppositories, so you're on the hook for your asshole.

And oh, is John Howard an asshole. John Howard's Australia strikes me as the kind of place America would be if Dick Cheney were actually openly in charge, and not running things from behind his frat-boy sock puppet. Oh, and if we weren't a huge military superpower. We can start wars, they can get a complete English sentence out of their head of state, but otherwise, it's a lot of same shit, different hemisphere.

For example, one common trait the two countries share. Whenever anyone in the establishment denies fervently that racism had anything to do with it, it's because racism blatantly, obviously, had something to do with it. We had it during Katrina, and Australia has theirs with this statement from Howard on two days of mob violence in the suburbs of Sydney. ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

"I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people. I do not believe Australians are racist." - Prime Minister John Howard, probably within 30 minutes either side of opening another detention camp for immigrants and refugees.

Nope, no underlying racism in Australia. Never mind the riots, which, according to reports, started when a bunch of drunken white youths, sparked by a false report of a lifeguard being attacked, started going after anyone they thought might be an Arab.

Nope, no underlying racism in Australia. And certainly no underlying organizations of white power, neo-nazi groups who were able to release a video called "The Battle Of Cronulla" within a day of the start of the riots, and call for non-whites to be banned from Australian beaches.

Nope, no underlying racism in Australia, despite a national history of native oppression and xenophobia that puts it nicely on par with the rest of the Western world, who haven't exactly become pan-ethnic utopias either.

People were painting "We grew here, you flew here" on their back and beating up anyone with more melanin than Morrissey. In a country that has been pushing the War On The Swarthy as hard, if not harder, than the US and Britain have.

But racism isn't a problem, if you ask Howard. He said the riots were a "law and order issue". In other words, it's not the hate, it's the expression of that hate via brick and fist. The problem isn't underlying racism, it's that the racism simply isn't underlying enough.